I’m a fidgety person on a normal day. My ADD, or ADHD, or HDTV – whatever you want to call it – controls my body like I’m Pinocchio before the strings were taken away. So during the course of a normal day, about every 15 to 20 minutes, I have to get up and just snoop around the office. I like to think of myself as the office guard dog, making sure Dig is a safe and comforting place for all who set foot into its halls. I’m sure my coworkers just think, “There goes the OCD kid again, walking around every 15 minutes like clockwork. I wish he’d get some f*cking work done.” (If you can’t tell, my self-worth is in serious trouble. In either one of those scenarios, I’m either a canine who drools on himself, or someone everyone hates.)

Regardless, whatever my medical flaws are, they have been amplified by 10,000,000 times this week. It’s just scientific logic that when a man or woman has a vacation that starts in the near future, the first thing to suffer is work productivity. It’s a syndrome I like to call “I don’t give a %&#@” disease. We know we are coming back to work, most of us know it will be within a few days, but we don’t give a %&#@. In my case, this is particularly bad because not only do I get to leave the confines of the 8-to-5 for a few days, but I’m also going to the adult’s playground to do so: Las Vegas.

Yeah. You heard me. I’m going to Vegas to steal a tiger, convince my mentally handicapped brother to win me money, and mastermind an elaborate scheme to rob Andy Garcia.

If you’ve never been to Vegas, there are few things I can say to help you comprehend the levels of excitement that are bubbling up inside. I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve, except this time I won’t be staying up to see if Santa is real. What I will be doing is staying up to see if that chick who gave me her number outside of the club at Caesar’s Palace was actually a female, or if she was just one of those really convincing dude-ladies that Steven Tyler sang about.

The thing you need to know about Las Vegas is that no matter what you do, how much you plan, or how much you watch Vegas movie marathons to prepare yourself, it’s never enough. That’s just the nature of the beast. Being from Louisiana, we think that we are more prepared than most, like the Crescent City is the Vegas of the South. New Orleans has given us such inflated, um, heads. Yes. So while I’ve never walked down the street in Vegas and seen a man peeing smack dab in the middle of it (then deduced in my drunken state that this must be the public bathroom and joined him), what I have done in Vegas is…never mind…I can’t really talk about it. Or maybe I’m not supposed to. Or, maybe I just don’t want to talk about it.

The point is, Vegas sneaks up on a young strapping lad like Freddy Kruger on the dumb blonde who gets killed first. You don’t step out into Vegas nightlife expecting that some crazy Hangover-type antics are about to go down, because before you know it it’ll be 5:30 in the morning and you will have just walked out of whichever casino or “dancing establishment” you were in with one pant leg torn at the seam from crotch to ankle. You’ll also have several “Hello, My Name Is” stickers on random parts of your body, with occasional “If lost, please call” instructions. Then you’ll stumble out into the street to catch a taxi and realize you only took cash for the night, leaving your card at the hotel just to be “smart.” You will find yourself at the opposite end of the strip with no money and a three-mile drunken stumble ahead of you. (Walk is way too strong a term for the physical activity that you will attempt.)

And so, little birds, the lesson to be learned here is that you never know what is going to happen. That’s the beauty of it. That is why we go to Vegas. And, of course, by “we” I mean my degenerate friends and myself. I just hope I make it back alive this time!